Nick McKim (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

As I was saying, these people who are deliberately destroying the capacity of our planet to sustain life as we know it in order to line their pockets with the most obscene levels of profit are chewing up the planet and excreting misery and poison. In Australia, we are in a situation where millions of Australians are struggling to make ends meet and cannot pay their school fees, pay their rent and put food on the table. Many of them are actually living out of their cars or their tents at the moment, and they'll continue to be living in those circumstances notwithstanding the measures in this budget. For people who are renting or on income support, it is particularly tough.

But let's not kid ourselves that this is by accident; it's not. This is a deliberate choice made by those who are in power. Poverty is a political choice, and the failure of last night's budget to change the status quo in any meaningful way is Labor endorsing a choice to leave people in poverty in this country. Instead of investing in essential services and providing meaningful support to those who are most vulnerable, Labor have chosen to retain $254 billion—a quarter of a trillion dollars—in stage 3 tax cuts that overwhelmingly favour the billionaires and the already super wealthy in this country. That's who the big winners are from this budget. The big winners are not the people who most needed help from the government—the people who are living in poverty, the people on income support, the people whose real wages have been going backwards for the last decade, the people who are trying to pay mortgages after 10 consecutive interest rate rises. They're not the winners. The winners of this budget are the super wealthy, and we should all be very clear about that.

The government is choosing to hand over $360 billion for nuclear subs—no austerity for the military industrial complex, I might add. That's half a trillion dollars that the government could have chosen to use to lift people out of poverty, address the housing crisis or wipe student debt. But, instead, it is the wealthy and the military industrial complex that are the big winners, while, every single day, people are skipping meals and struggling to pay their power bills or to keep a roof over their heads. It's a fundamental job of government to make sure people have the basics they need to live a life with dignity. But this budget, for many Australians, is going to make things actually worse with $74 billion cut out of the NDIS—$74 billion was removed from the NDIS. There was more spent on subsidising the burning of fossil fuels than in the totality of the government's climate change programs. There is nothing for nature repair, nothing for our oceans and four times as much in tax cuts for the rich than on cost-of-living support for Australians who desperately need it. This budget is a betrayal of the people who Labor promised would not be left behind. 'Nobody left behind,' says Labor. There must be an awful lot of nobodies in this country, because there were plenty of people left behind by this Labor government. Treasurer Chalmers has made a choice to put a surplus ahead of supporting people living in poverty.

I want to quickly address the issue of budget repair. This is a mantra of those in power, the neoliberals and the deficit hawks. Let's be clear: budget repair is a garbage excuse to ensure that help is denied to people who need it. Australia does not have a government debt problem. By international standards, our debt is very low, and, by historic standards, our interest rate repayments on debt are very low. We didn't need to pay down the debt; we needed to help people. And a surplus is not an end in itself; you cannot eat a surplus. The government should not be crowing about having banked 82 per cent of the windfall revenues while people are living in cars and tents.

So, here's the question: why should we accept a government that is content to leave so many people behind while showering the benefits on the wealthy? The answer is simple: we shouldn't accept it. We deserve better. The Greens are absolutely committed to achieving better. We want to see bold action that looks after our ecosystems and creates a fairer, more just Australia, and we are absolutely willing to take up the fight to deliver those things.